Indian Crime Fiction: The Missing Story

   Indian Crime Fiction: The Missing Story

                                                                               

Hard-boiled detective fiction has its roots in pulp fiction.  Pulp writers whose stories appeared in cheap paper magazines with glossy covers in the western world in the first half of  20^th century( Edgar Rice Burroughs; Ray Bradbury; Jackie Collins; Ian Fleming; Erle Stanley Gardner; H.P. Lovecraft; Mario Puzo; Jacqueline Susann) made it into the list of bestsellers of crime and science fiction with changing times and technology.  They are the inventors of the modern genres, such as, the western, the detective novel, the spy thriller, the science fiction, the horror, the legal thriller, the crime fiction and the erotic/romance novel.

They wrote fast paced, escapist, action-packed adventure, involving sensual femme fatales and mysterious thugs, corrupt police and bigger-than-life heroes in exotic places, for popular culture i.e. the man in a tea stall, the housewife with six children, the students and others travelling in buses and trains.  It was not aimed at the elite literati.  The language was lucid and plain and sometimes also incorporated slangs and expletives. The low price of the pulp magazine, coupled with easy exciting entertainment contributed to the success of the medium.  Along the way, it produced many iconic writers who transcended the genre by mastering basics of a pulsating page turning novel.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’ skyrocketing appeal replaced the previous generation of writers followed by Agatha Christie's Poirot, and then PD James' Adam Dalgliesh.  Decades later, they still reign supreme in India.  But an ever thirsting hunt is on for a home-grown author to reclaim and take the genre of crime detective fiction to dizzying heights – to map the phenomenon once again, in our own country.

Experiments have ranged from Tagore’s Feluda series (a Sherlockian pastiche) in Bangla, the Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp fiction, to the flourishing market of Surender Mohan Pathaks, Ved Prakash Sharmas and Amit Khans sold at A H Wheelers stands at railway stations.  A revolution in Hindi pulp fiction (begun in Meerut in 1960s) took the country on a cascading ride of the jasoosi upanyas.  A crime world inhabited by rakish secret agents, dames, outlandish plots, heists and eyeball grabbing titles. They were the dons of the Hindi belt with 100% stake in the book market. With 300 titles or more to each of their credit, their paperback books went in for a first print edition of a lakh. Some of their writings were also adapted to blockbuster Bollywood films. At the height of their booming markets with the advent of TV boom in the nineties, they lost their readership to soap-serials. Presently they only retain 15% of the book publishing market. Inspite of their staggering success in their heyday, their books were never hailed as bestsellers, neither were they interviewed on national print media till their books were translated into English by Sudarshan Purohit a few years back.  He translated Surender Mohan Pathak's success novels The 65 Lakh Heist and Daylight Robbery.   

It is this fetish for English language (so-called Indian snobbery) which Chetan Bhagat very craftily cashed on to in his foray into the book world.  He became an icon in a few years time, a feat which the Pathaks, and Sharmas aspired to, but could not achieve. Very quickly in his footsteps followed Amish Tripathi and Ashwin Sanghavi. Their subjects were everyday or mythical, in comprehensible English prose and appealed to the man on the street. Reading this class of fiction, the common man felt himself a part of the literate English speaking community of the milieu, it boosted his ego.

But the palpable Indian crime thriller still languishes and the hunt is on to find the legendary writer and spy duo that can fill the shoes of a Christie/Poirot.  Ashok Banker, one of the first Indian crime fiction novelists in English, feels that given a choice the Indian reader still prefers to pick a crime thriller written by a foreigner. “The detective figure is a largely western concept; a myth of supremacy featuring a white male figure, superior in strength and intellect to those around him, who will save the world or the day. A tradition inherited by the Americans from the British.”

But is it really an inherited genre?  Chanakya’s Arthashastra greatly intrigues British-origin journalist and writer Tarquin Hall, living in New Delhi for the last couple of years.  Married to an Indian, Hall is known for his books such as Salaam Brick Lane and The Elephant Graveyard.  His detective novel series, set in Delhi, features a private detective Vish Puri who operates out of Khan Market. He says he did a report on real-life Indian detectives in Delhi. One of the detectives' inspirations was Chanakya. “He was quite dismissive of British characters like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, because Indians have been spies for over 3000 years. It was all laid out by Chanakya in the Arthashastra. If you read that, it talks about how to be a spy, how to spy on your subjects, neighbours and which disguises to use, how to infiltrate households, that sort of thing.  It's amazing stuff.” 

Ibne Saifi, the Urdu writer of undivided India, created the much admired Colonel Vinod, an exponent of suspense, mystery and adventure.  He inspired the Bollywood poet Javed Akhter to create larger than life characters for films.  His main works were the 125-book series Jasoos Dunya (The Spy World) and the 120-book Imran series. The first English translations of Ibne Safi's mystery novels began appearing in 2010, with The House of Fear from the Imraan Series, translated by Bilal Tanweer(he has been at GALF) and published by Random House India. Contrary to the debate on lost in translations, the very process is a milestone in realizing a global world.  Highbrow and popular literature from remote niches is accessible to the whole publishing world irrespective of communal and language boundaries.

Kalpana Swaminathan’s inspector Lalli and  Mukul Deva (Man with the Nostradamus touch, and The God of all things) noted for his spy-military thrillers on terrorism and action, have predominantly made inroads into the genre.  Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games  and Anita Nair’s Cut Like Wound, too have topped bestseller charts intermittently.  Zac O'Yeah, author of crime novels and a detective fiction columnist for Mint Lounge, says “Crime novels are like therapy; crime novels tell you something about how to survive in the big bad city with its everyday threats and traps. There are cultural aspects that make India different; a certain complexity in society, the family system in India is tighter, stronger. Detectives have to think more of their personal honor than a typical Western private eye, who lives outside the system as a loner. An Indian detective is more connected to his or her clan and the larger social concerns of family life. Then, there is non-violence, a strong tradition, and a belief in karma: a detective cannot just shoot anybody just like that, or he or she might be reborn as a cockroach in his/her next life.”

New entrant in the arena is Kulpreet Yadav, whom I met at the Readers Writers Festival 2014, at Kala Academy, Goa. He straddles two boats, the literary and popular writing. A retired Defence officer, he very candidly admitted that with his Andy Karan trilogy he aspires to excel in popular literature.

The case of the crime detective thriller is out and the jury has still to come in about the legendary Indian writer and spy duo to top the Indian noir!

Young Adult Literature To Tell or Not to Tell

                                        Young Adult Literature

                                                To Tell or Not to Tell

Kirsty Murray knows exactly what she is doing and where she is going with children in the age group 11- 14 years. Her writings speak to the section of children who have outgrown candy floss but are yet not clouded by the consciousness of an adolescent. An ebullient set, no longer naïve and who, have a mind of their own. They actively think, and search for answers to questions that tweak their curiosity. She says it is a moment in space between childhood and adolescence. Her readership also includes adventurous adults and grandmothers. The former want to keep tabs on what they missed at that age and the latter are intrigued by the central theme of many of her books i.e. Australian History. 

After a long lacunae in children’s literature in India,  Subhadra Sen Gupta and Ranjit Lal  are to  young Indian adults what Murray is to her young readers in Australia. These writers have made historical fiction-writing their forte and churn out a fine blend of fact and fiction to hook young readers to their historical past. History, instead of a series of dates and dry academic prosaic text, is being rendered in colourful, imaginative stories. No doubt, the young population is booked- hook, line and sinker with graphic detailing of periods of history.

Writing historical fiction is a specialized genre akin to making a film. It involves gargantuan research of a particular period in history; fiction rooted in truth and reality. The writer has to conjure up the whole scene of the era; the political, social and economical undercurrents. The frames or chapters bring alive the fashion of the time, language that people spoke, the belief systems interweaving the societies in question. With great dexterity, the writer then threads together historical personalities with fictional characters in the book which holds the entire fabric of the theme together. The fictional characters are figments of his imagination, intimate and thorough, whereas the real life historical characters are elusive and distant. They have a life of their own, already lived and fleshed out. In the hands of acclaimed authors like Murray and Sen Gupta, the book acquires the quality of a classic, the depth of a Dickensian prose and the pace of a thriller. A humble form of writing, wherein the writer has to metamorphose and tell a true story that already exists. What a colourful and interesting way indeed of reading and understanding history compared to dry historical treatise.  Its subjectivity is another story altogether, a topic for another time.

Generation X young adults like me, who were born between the 60s to the 80s, were treated as children even when they got married, and it was thought unkind, insensitive to discuss matters of love, sex, money or death with them. The culture in India did not encourage literature on any of the taboo topics for young readers, and per force our generation in the absence of internet had to depend on books from abroad mainly UK. Many children stopped reading beyond 10 yrs because they did not find literature that stimulated their minds. They otherwise turned to adult writings and outgrew their age, fast and furious. Today the story is different.  Lal has written about female foeticide and terrorism in his books, Faces in the Water and Battle at No. 19, which are everyday issues that young children deal in their neighbourhood. Mind you, there was a great controversy in India about his books when they were first published and the debate, though mellowed, still continues across the Indian milieu.  Murray’s latest book The Year It All Ended released in September, 2014, deals with female teenagers grappling with post World War I trauma and death.

Amongst earlier Murray writings, which particularly caught my attention, (a thread to this debate),  is The Lilliputians published by Zubaan in 2012. The Australian title of the book is Dark India. We can classify it as historical fiction based on a true story that began in Australia and reached a palpable climax in India. The renowned Pollard Opera Company in Australia at the turn of the 20^th century also included a troupe of young performers in age group 10-17 yrs. In 1909, with twenty nine chil­dren in tow, Arthur/Baby Pol­lard set off on a two-year world tour that ended in dis­as­ter. After hundred shows through various countries on a hot Feb­ru­ary night in Madras, twenty-four of the chil­dren went on strike. They walked out on Arthur, refus­ing to work with him ever again. They charged him with sexual assault, cruelty and sheer negligence. It caused an inter­na­tional scandal.

In conversation with Murray at the Writers Readers Festival, we spoke about this intriguing story. She said that fic­tion is one of the most pow­er­ful ways of telling the truth about real life. To recon­struct the adven­tures, she took the cast list of the orig­i­nal troupe and care­fully rein­vented all the chil­dren as fic­ti­tious char­ac­ters, match­ing their ages and roles in the troupe with their real life coun­ter­parts. As to per­son­al­ity and char­ac­ter traits, she had to imag­ine what they might have been like, draw­ing on only scraps of evi­dence. There were also plenty of news­pa­per reports that covered the court case in which the chil­dren were even­tu­ally embroiled. While she was in South India, she also gained access to court records.  She said, “I’m sure the real life char­ac­ters would tell dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the events but what made the story so inter­est­ing is that every­one in the troupe told their friends, fam­ily and the news­pa­pers a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of what tran­spired. Truth really is stranger than fic­tion – or at least it’s more confusing.”

When she first started work­ing on the book, she knew she wanted a thirteen-year-old girl to be the prin­ci­pal nar­ra­tor. “Poesy’s naivety was impor­tant because as the adven­ture unfolded, she was going to have to become much worldlier”. But as she researched the story, she began to real­ize that there were so many ways that you could inter­pret the truth of what hap­pened, that she needed to con­sider other per­spec­tives. “When you read the news­pa­per reports, there are so many angry and dif­fer­ing ver­sions of the truth that I knew I needed to present at least more than one. Once I started writ­ing from Tilly’s per­spec­tive as well as Poesy, the story became much more vivid and intrigu­ing. Tilly, cynical and older, allowed me to explore a slightly darker and more pow­er­ful ver­sion of the events.”

A true story of sexual assault, jealousy, competition and secrecy which became a reality amongst the troupe of children guided or misguided by one adult. The latter was made out to be a monster by compounded lies, sleaze and differing truths than he actually was. When young adults read this book, they realise the dark human elements that come into play in a story of sleaze in real life.

“Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. You have to expose who you are so that you can determine what you need to become.” Cynthia A Patterson

Indeed a great genre of writing taken up by writers like Kirsty Murray, Subhadra Sen Gupta and Ranjit Lal for young adults! 

Readers Writers Festival 2014

                                        Readers Writers Festival 2014

In the ‘World of Books’, the writers play a very important role, for the very act of writing stems from them. On the other hand, the readers play an equally important role; because if we were not passionate about books, took delight in varied writings or critically analysed the nuances and syntax of sentences in books, the very act of writing would go in vain. We, as readers, literary critics and book lovers, are here to play that important role in the ‘World of Books’.  The French literary critic and theorist Roland Bathes, in his essay ‘The Death of the Author’, said, “Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the passions or tastes of the writer. A text's unity lies not in its origins or its creator, but in its destination or its audience. The author is merely a scriptor (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority"). The scriptor exists to produce, but not to explain the work and is not the subject with the book as predicate. Every work is eternally written here and now, with each re-reading, because the origin of meaning lies exclusively in language itself and its impressions on the reader.”

The appropriately named, The Writers Readers Festival 2014(4th-7^th Oct) at Kala Academy, to the contrary constituted a pantheon of writers and only a handful of ardent readers. The organizers had left no stone unturned with their worthy contingent of writers from home and abroad, reading workshops, interesting panel discussions and a book shop. Readers have a promise to keep in the thriving industry of books, and complacency might just be our loss and only ours to lament. Our allegiance is to the word, its celebration and glorification and none else. If books and eminent writers are being presented to us on a platter, a committed reader would rejoice and devour the word, in abeyance of everything else.

Thomas Keneally, the star author of the festival, took centre stage in many a discussion. In his early eighties, with a writing career of fifty years and still writing, he impressed the audience with experiences and anecdotes of his writing sojourn interspersed with a ringing tone of hearty, belly-rumbling laughter. Shortlisted for the Booker prize four times, he finally won the award with Schindler’s Ark in 1982. A piece of narrative journalism morphed into a book, made famous by the film Schindler’s List directed by Steven Spielberg. Rooted in an ethos when word was sacred, a grandfather come to town, he regaled the audiences with his raspy voice and old world charm peppered with a humorous recount of the writings, then and now and his crusade for the republic of Australia. He rightly endeared himself to all listeners when he humbly apologized for the brutal killings of Indian students by Australians in Melbourne, in the last couple of years. His moments of delight and satisfaction were mirrored in his memories of a meeting with a woman reader on the skiing slopes of USA, who couldn’t but stop herself from conveying to him the delight she had experienced in reading his books.

Romesh Gunesekara, aptly given the epithet guruji by Sudeep Chakravarti, during a master’s class on narrative voices, too echoed the feeling of pure joy and contentment that certain writings bring to us. Literary festivals, writings, publishing, marketing are but endeavours towards that ephemeral bliss of the word that writers and readers aim for. His book Reef shortlisted for the Booker in 1994, and recent writing Noon Tide Toll was enumerated at discourses through the festival. His fine diction riding on a wave of lilting verbal pronouncements was delightful to the ears in the Black Box ambience.

Chinaman, authored by Shehan Karunatilaka, is a beguiling book, like the chinaman art of  a bowler in cricket. Great stylistic writing by Karunalatika, the book appears gullible to the reader, painting an evocative picture of cricket and an alcoholic journalist’s search for a lost cricketer. It kicks in the chinaman when the narrative unravels its intricately woven theme of strife-torn socio-political milieu of Sri Lanka in the late 20th century: of boy gangs and merciless ripping open of flesh in a bus of daily commuters. The writer came across as a person of gravity, a deep thinker and interrogator, questioning and then exposing the grinding truth in harsh black and white colours.

Miguel Syjico, the Filipino writer from Manila, left a significant mark at the festival. Born into a dynastic political family of the Philippines, he opted to be a writer. His debut novel, Illustrado won many awards. He proclaimed that he would continue to be a thorn in the flesh for politicians through his writing. Through parody, he imbues his characters with conflicting ideas, to expose the phony through exploration of human psyche. He said he is continuously debunking his own prejudices, inclinations and limitations through his writing journeys.

Kirsty Murray, the children’s writer from Australia, delighted readers with her strong views on themes of books for teenagers. She expressed a vital need for writers to write about subjects that children experience in their adolescence. She hailed writers like Ranjit Lal and Manjula Padmanabhan from India who have written about sensitive issues like female foeticide and terrorism and other everyday realities in Indian neighbourhoods. Her book The Year It All Ended about lives of teenage girls deals with the repercussions of World War I and death.

Stephen Mccarty endeared himself by his very affable disposition and interesting set of steering questions as a moderator for panel discussions. Prajwal Parajuly’s candid responses aimed at a plain, authentic author at work.

Home-grown contingent included poetry readings from Tishani Doshi, Meena Kandasamy, Mamta Sagar, Revathi Kutti.......Sudeep Chakravarti, the journalist-turned-author, masterfully anchored discussions and expounded on his writings through troubled lands. He also stressed on the use of social networks by writers and smart methodologies to handle trolls on twitter and facebook. Manu Joseph recounted his interview with the Hindu ideologue Parveen Togadia and extreme positions taken by politicians in our so-called secular country.    

 Goan writers were represented by Savia Viegas and  Frederick Noronha, who moderated panel discussion on writings in Konkani, Portuguese, Marathi, and English in Goa, and the prevailing connection between Portugal and Goa. Resourceful as ever Divya Kapur served an unending delicious soufflé of books over the counter, of every author in the fest. Kudos!

Anil Alaham Kumar, CP Surendran and Sheweta Bajaj, the main organizers and anchors of the mega event have added an interesting event to the calendar of events in Goa, for which the book reading public of Goa is greatly indebted. The Readers Writers Festival 2014 first belonged to the readers and then to the writers. To many a successful recurrence through the years to come!

The Ramayana Manuscript Trails

           The Ramayana Manuscript Trails

Today I shall expound on texts old and colossal, which have prevailed through the upheavals of the human civilization and come to us profound and pure. In their inception, hands and souls worked tirelessly to give them their monumental status, imbuing them with metaphysical powers. Texts and illustrations created out of a labour of love and ingenuity, not of an age but for all times.  Along the way, they suffered and were maligned by ignorant fools, but the saving grace of the continuous tribe of cultural creatives, washed stains of negligence and tedium incessantly, breathing fresh vigour and strength into them intermittently. Such unfailing energy and ceaseless rallying against all odds have finally morphed the ageless texts to suit the climes of the present age.

Our greatest and longest love story with the epic Ramayana saw another triumph this year. The Mewar Ramayana, the most beautifully illustrated manuscript of the Valmiki Ramayan, is available today at the click of a mouse at www.bl.uk/ramayana. Sources say that it was a mega project costing Rs 27 lakhs sponsored by Jamsetji Tata Trust, and was unveiled at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) Museum in March, 2014. Readers can view 377 rare paintings out of the 450, and listen to an audio, turning digitized pages like leaves of the original text.

My trail of research inspired by the lecture series VISUAL NARRATIVES OF INDIA: TEXT AND IMAGE by Professor Vidya Dehejia at the Goa University last month turned out to be an interesting tale of treasure lost and found. The seven Kandas of the Mewar Ramayana created in the 17^th century, got segregated and handed down to different people and countries through the continuing centuries, with trails gone cold.  It was commissioned by Maharana Jagat Singh of the Rajput kingdom in the early half of the 1650s. The Mewari Ranas extolled the service of scribes and artists to build great manuscript libraries, a mark of great prestige and honour of the times. The project was carried out by many painters, the Sahibdin workshop being the most noteworthy. A single scribe undertook the text. The entire manuscript took five years for completion and was revered by the dynasty as an extremely valuable treasure. (Sisodiya Rajputs are thought to be the direct descendants of Rama in the Suryavanshi clan).

 JP Losty, the curator of visual arts at the British library, recounts an interesting story of how the Mewar Ramayana comprising of seven volumes got segregated and transported to different lands from Rajasthan. In 1820, Maharana Bhim Singh, great friends with James Tod the then British agent of Rajput states, presented him four volumes of the mega literature who in turn gifted them to the Duke of Sussex, a man of letters with a magnificent library. Thereafter, they were bought by the British museum and pristinely bound into two volumes at the British library. Losty came upon them in the 1970s and, highly mesmerized by the magnitude of his find, relentlessly pursued all clues leading him finally to the volumes at Jodhpur and Mumbai in museums and private collections of royal families. After 200 years, the Mewar Ramayana, a colossal monument of our rich heritage, exists in a modern technological avatar within everyone’s reach, to savour and delight to our heart’s content.

The folios are horizontal, like leaves, with paintings on one side and the text on the other side. It is intriguing to note that the illustrations illuminate three forms of Mewar paintings– the Sahibdin and Manohar workshop studios and an unknown artist working in Mewar- Deccani style. Use of reds and browns, pointed nose, large eyes and angular features mark a Mewari figurative painting. The skyline is shown in waves and water in semicircular markings of inky blue. Trees are elaborate with the ubiquitous mango tree with fresh-washed green interspersed with dark green and red leaves.

Equally intriguing is the story of the first Persian manuscript of the Ramayana during king Akbar’s reign. The great patron of arts and culture commissioned the imperial Ramayana in the 16^th century to dispel the fanatical hatred between Hindus and Muslims, an offspring of ignorance of each other’s scriptures. He called upon his senior scholar Abdul Qadir Badayuni to render the Ramayana in Persian. The latter, a staunch Muslim, took up the project reluctantly, but meticulously worked on it for four years, to excellent results. The 176 illustrations are replicated in imperial Mughal art. The manuscript was greatly revered by his mother and line of Mughal rulers later, who perused it at different times through the next two centuries. It is interesting to note that about the same time, Tulsidas  too worked on the Ram Charita Manas, Rama’s story in Awadhi.

Greatly enamored by the  imperial Ramayana, Abdur-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan   commissioned the Khan Khanan Ramayana that was accessible to general public and scholars who came to see him in his library, workshop and at other forums. He was the mightiest general of Akbar’s army, son of Bairam Khan who had served as regent to young Akbar. Sources indicate that in 1886, Colonel Henry Bathhurst Hanna, a Britisher stationed in India for about thirty years, purchased the Khan Khanan Ramayana thinking it to be the Imperial Ramayana. Later research on the Persian scripts of the Ramayana itself proved that it was not the Imperial Ramayana. In 1907, Charles Lang Freer purchased the Khan Khanan Ramayana and since then it is in the collections of the Smithsonianâ Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.  Written in lucid Persian in the Manaswi fashion rather than the cantos of Valmiki Ramayana, it is calligraphed by the experts of Akbar’s court. The paintings show apparent influences of Indian, Iranian and Mongolian styles of art. The text at times disrupts the paintings and appears on the same side of the folio as the painting. 

Another notable work is that of Masih, a Sanskrit scholar in Benaras for 12 years who reworked the  Ramayan into  5407 couplets. Sham Lal Angara in Jammu is in possession of a rare Ramayana in Persian which begins with Bismillah-i-rahman ar-rahim, which is also how the Quran begins: clearly indicative of the secular outlook of Shah Jahan’s son who was the translator of this beautiful treasure.

These old texts exist in a class of their own.  Custodians of our tradition and history, they are a living presence and bind centuries of human souls, who speak to us of our rich heritage. Mortals engaged in their creation and preservation acquire an immortality carried through   whispering echoes within the confines of these monumental volumes! 

The Lightness of Being

         The  Lightness of  Being

                   A meditation on Ananthamurthy’s writing and a comparative study in reflection :

 “Once more there sounded within me the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity, no other chance will be given to us.” 
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba The Greek . (Greek writer and philosopher 1883-1957)

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is, therefore, simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment.  The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” 
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Living Czech literary icon 1929)

“Quite a lusty lot, those sages. What was the name of the fellow who ravished the fisherwoman smelling of fish, right in the boat and gave her body a permanent perfume? And now, look at these poor brahmins, descended from such sages! . . . Let’s see who wins in the end—you or me. I’ll destroy brahminism, I certainly will. My only sorrow is that there’s no brahminism really left to destroy in this place—except you.”

UR Ananthamurthy, Samskara (Great Indian Kannada writer1932-2014)

Life is a conundrum and in its unravelling many philosophers and thinkers have written and shared their insights. The above three writers are famous deep thinkers whose writings have impacted the world. In these novels, they explore the common theme of what path a human being should take- “weight or lightness?”  

A world where the sacred and the profane exist together, we are lost in a maze of big questions of God, religion and its ramifications of virtue and sin. We revel in segregation, compartmentalizing ourselves on the basis of religion, borders, colour, language, caste etc.  It does not end there. There are gulfs tearing the hedonists from the pious within communities and families.  A rivalry which has left many; confused and perplexed.  Who is a man of God – one who is good but indulges his senses; is wild, nomadic, parties, drinks, gambles, has mistresses; or the one who prays religiously, has no desires, is a celibate, crown jewel of vedic knowledge. What do you choose- ‘weight or lightness”

The epitaph on Kazantzakis tomb illuminates the path of freedom - "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free." Kazantzakis’ works are full of joy, especially Zorba the Greek. The book is a hymn to life and love, personified in the character sketch of Zorba; the epitome of pulsating life force. It urges you to stop reading words and go jump into the stream of life; and live it king size. Wrapping oneself in an atmosphere of daily sights, sounds and smells – wild sage, savory mint and thyme. The orange-blossom scent worn by Madame Hortense, silvery olive trees, fig and vines, kitchen gardens, swims in the sea, the wine drunk; dancing to strains of the santuri, friendship, sex, separation and loss.
Zorba, the wonderful Macedonian man lives each day as if it is his last, completely involved in what he is doing; making love or working the lignite mines. He dances to life, actually, authentically and practically. When he cannot express the feelings and energy in words, he dances with gay abandon to the beat of each moment. He lives in perpetual awe of everything around him. He looks at trees, the sky, flowers, women, children as if he is seeing them for the first time. He revels in the mystery of creation and considers the world his playground to frolic and indulge.  His zest for life is all inclusive. The narrator played by Alan Bates is a foil to Zorba. He is a writer wrestling in his lair with his writing of Buddha, trying to comprehend the world through words and mysticism. Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ and the ‘Man as Overman’, are concepts which pattern the exchange between them. In the end, it isn’t squiggly inky impressions of words on paper, and the endless ruminations and reflections, but the act of living them which can make a difference. If ever there was a role that Anthony Quinn was born to play, it was the lusty, life-affirming character in Zorba, the Greek. The film made the book world famous.
Kazantzakis was an existentialist as much as Franz Kafka, his contemporary. But their philosophy was so very different. Whereas Kafka battled with a meaningless existence with paranoia, absurdity and madness, Kazantzakis pitched into the flow of life with a madness of sheer abandon and love. While Kafka is disturbed and depressed by the cruel universe, Kazantzakis is delighted by its mystery. He does not know if God exists or truth exists, but he has an amazing appetite for plain existence. Life is simple, devoid of Cartesian duality. Therefore, the ordinary is extraordinary for him. The Kafkaesque ideology imbues us with dread and gloom. A contemporary writer who comes to mind in the same line of thought would be Milan Kundera.

Kundera’s  ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ compares and contrasts light and heavy characters. The former live a full life indulging their senses.  Self-centeredness, detachment and the present moment to be explored and lived to its hilt form their guiding principle in life. They are not guided by regret, sin, guilt or an afterlife. The latter are bound by duty, honour and truth and their karma. The ultimate climax, nonetheless, does not render any one character contented and happy with their choices.

Ananthamurthy, the doyen of brahminical  practices,  pitches moral superiority of  Praneshacharya’s yogic existence against the degenerate living  of Naranappa.  Each of them is principled and staunch in his armour. The former is an ascetic having married an invalid girl and is regarded as the crown of vedic knowledge. His route to salvation is open , bright and clear. And Naranappa can see through the bigotry of the entire clan and lives life on his terms.   ”The battle of wills continues even after death, with Naranappa  demanding death rites  across the void. Pranesacharysa meets his nemesis in Chandri – the prostitute- mistress of his rival when he embraces her and in his act of loving her, he becomes Naranappa. Thus begins  his journey of rebirth, wisdom and a questioning of what he believed to be true.  What do you choose “weight or lightness?”

The common thread in each of the books forefronts the conundrum of the yogi versus the hedonist. What do  you choose – “ weight or lightness?”  The dawn of the wisdom that the duo rest on an even plane leads to the lightness of being! Samskara becomes the tenet of transformation, liberation and ultimate freedom. 

Crusade for Freedom

Crusade for Freedom

Much in news, Ritu Menon’s Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal catapults the duo again into the limelight. Nayantara Sahgal the first woman political columnist of India, daughter of Vijayalaksmi Pandit and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, and Ritu Menon famous writer and publisher of the fame of Women Unlimited, and co-founder of Kali for Women. 

The Political Imagination: A Personal Response to Life Literature and Politics, Sahgal’s latest book, was also launched together with her biography. From the personal stemmed the political and the literary. The political became her truth because of her family’s legacy and literary her passion, a clear paper canvas on which she artistically inked her life in totality. A chronicler of the making of modern India, she opposed Indira Gandhi vehemently during the emergency, through her underground literature and spent a year abroad to escape the threat to her life. She became the keeper of Nehruvian (a surrogate father, her idol) democracy and secularism, when his own kith and kin were embroiled in despotic measures. She yearns for a restoration of the idealism of Gandhi and Nehru – and rests her faith on change, the harbinger of balance and rectitude.

 The title ‘Out of Line’ of the biography could be interpreted as an unusual attempt by Menon to write on a person who has already been written about expansively, and whose writings and interviews have appeared in print extensively; or the ‘out of line’ material that Menon manages to unearth, details{ intimate and personal} of her glamorous life, close to her being, which she divulges now that she is a happy 87 years old. Menon describes Sahgal’s ’writing life’ evocatively as one “in which the personal, the political and the literary were so intertwined as to be like three plyn yarn.” The chapters in the book are titled after her novels: A Time to be Happy, This Time of Morning, A day in Shadow....Rich like Us, Mistaken Identity..........

What ties the two women together, the subject and the biographer is their crusade for women emancipation. Sahgal is foremost a political writer but her fiction is a diatribe against the oppressive forces of tradition and society. Her characters are not so much as products of imagination as real life people in her own society. “In fiction there is no such thing as closure, you keep drawing on your own life and those of many people’s around you. “ Nehru’s direction that she write from her own experience, stayed with her and her political columns in newspapers, non-fiction writings and also fiction became autobiographical. The journey from Maya in A time to be Happy to Ranee in Mistaken Identity is a coming of age story of woman’s determination and self actualisation.

 Two real life events which guided her writing were her marriages, man- woman relationships and the arena of emotions accompanying them. The first turning point was her marriage to Gautam, a businessman. She got married at Anand Bhavan in Allahabad the Pandit’s  family home, attired in a khadi sari. She was at the time quiet taken in by Gautam, his suave intelligence, much like her uncle she thought. . She couldn’t have been more wrong. He was consumed with jealousy; he could not forget or forgive her affair with sculptor Ismat Noguchi and relationships with other men. The alienation and abandonment destroyed her. The unhappy marriage ended in a debilitating divorce in 1967. Thus, the major theme in her works is disharmony and dissolution of marriage. In storm in Chandigarh with a backdrop of the Punjab divide and acrimonious relationships of the chief ministers of Punjab and Haryana she portrays a miserable and discontent female protagonist Saroj who is tortured by her husband for having an affair in college before they got married. She wrote about divorce and freedom of an individual in lieu of a compromised silence at a time when divorce was heavily frowned upon.

The second major event was her decision to live with a brilliant bureaucrat, Edward Nirmal Mangat Rai which she described in her own words, “not an affair but a revolution, a self discovery that life had to be lived more fully in order to be meaningful.” Heroines in her successive novels progressively set out on a path of reflection, and self actualization, heading on a course of liberation and realization of their potential without remorse or guilt or help from any male or female counterpart. It’s as if they came upon the discovery within  themselves, to live full human lives of joy and contentment. Her feminist ideology propels women to seek autonomy and individuality, an assured self, a self- possession fired by an inner flame of shakti.  She delineates male protagonists like Ram, Dev, Inder, who propagate the patriarchal attitudes, and in the process not only victimize the women in their lives, but harm themselves through the oppressiveness and misery of their actions. When we downgrade the other, a part of us remains steeped down with them. She inspires men to rise and evolve to a full humanity.  

She was the first Indian women author writing in English to be published abroad. Ranee and Bhushan  in her last novel, Mistaken Identity, are her most evolved characters. Ranee though an illiterate 1930s queen, refuses to abide by her husband’s third marriage and live a life of indignity and utter disgrace. She abandons the veil and walks out of his house and later lives with comrade Yusuf of her own choice. Without him too she moves on bold and undeterred and does not even take help from her son Bhushan. The latter through his alliances with various women comes into his own and finds himself, for it is only through our relationship with others that we can know and discover ourselves. Each relationship is sacred and a conduit to realise your inner potential , a path to self discovery. She declares: "It takes half of life to achieve personhood but there is no greater glory." True to reflection her heroines Maya, Rashmi, Saroj, Simrit, and Devi act as real Shaktis and achieve freedom, after an initial phase of hesitation and turbulence. Thereafter Sonali, Anna and Ranee are self –realized protagonists who rebel remorselessly and fiercely treading their own paths of emancipation and victory.

Tradition and modernity are intertwined in her writings. The legacy of truth, nonviolence, satyagraha, social justice, prayer, simplicity, socialism, democracy, and progress is our political heritage. But when this tradition extends to interpersonal relationships a play field of ambiguity enters into it.  Her ambivalence to tradition in relationships comes across clearly through one of the characters: “Hinduism was boundless enough . . . to encompass the loftiest of metaphysics, rigid enough to despise the Untouchable. It was goodness and piety and the living light of faith. . . . Yet it was the sufferance of disease and clamour near the temple. It was torpor that accepted maimed limbs, blind eyes and abject poverty as destiny, letting generations live and die in hopelessness, and at the same time it was the majesty of the mind engaged in lifelong combat with the senses. It turned men into oppressors, who have internalized the violence of the patriarchy and in turn directed it outward at their wives. They have been handed down expectations about "husbandhood" and "wifehood" which are incompatible with contemporary reality.” When women like Saroj, Anna, Simrit walked out of their marriges they chose personal fulfilment, and individuality over silence and  obedience, that patriarchy upholds in marriages. The modern over the traditional – their guide being an inner strength and  shakti  which blazed a trail of light for them.

 "It has taken a million years of evolution for a person and his cherished individuality to matter . . . and no terror must be allowed to destroy that. In other words, tradition itself must provide the impetus for change by negating those of its aspects which are inimical to its survival,” states Nayantara Sahgal emphatically.

No doubt, she has been rightly compared to Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing for her crusades in political and feminist thought.

Book Readings - Live book Apps- Visual Storytelling of Classics